Memoir
Winter Trees Bare All Their Bones
Or The Unraveling
The trees said to the humans, “We have tales to tell.”
The humans said to the trees, “So do we.”
In my early 40s, I felt irreparably broken. My family — my husband and our two kids, aged twelve and 9, were at their wit's end. Mom wouldn’t stop weeping. I was worried for my livelihood as my spirit further eroded.
My breakdown happened throughout the summer and fall of 2019 and rolled over into the early months of 2020, right before coronavirus would irrevocably shake up the world.
My husband had no idea how to navigate this crisis of mine, so he reached out to my mom, who lives a couple of hours away and is retired. She agreed to stay with us for a while, to advocate for and care for me until I could do so on my own.
One afternoon Mom coaxed me out of the house for a drive. We drove through the city, then through the suburbs, and then through country towns. She turned right into a neighborhood and anxiously I asked her why she had turned off the main road.
“Just driving around,” she said, chancing a contemplative glance in my direction.
I thought she had come to save me from myself in one of my darkest hours. I did not want to be in her car driving around, told it was time to move through my emotional pain. That I couldn’t mope in my despair forever. That I was hurting myself, and my family. Luckily for me, nature has always enabled me to process my emotions. I chose to look as trees were briefly framed by car windows. This gave me some comfort. I promised myself I wouldn’t instigate an argument.
The neighborhood was small with big older houses and kids out riding bicycles. It was a crisp winter day between Christmas and New Year’s. The sun shone as we drove, and along our drive, we’d seen a couple of hawks perched on electrical wires. As soon as Mom traveled the few blocks of the neighborhood (I was relieved it was so small), she pulled out onto the main country road and parked on the grassy shoulder.
I dared to look over with a questioning glance as she pulled out yet another biblical reading. My mom is a woman of great faith. She has a complicated past with the Catholic church and an open mind towards the religions of the world. She bowed her head to read the passage, white hair glimmering in the sunlight.
I stared at two gnarled winter trees as she read; I tried to be patient, waiting for her to finish. I don’t recall what the passage was about but as she read the words, I knew it held a lot of significance for her. Mom carefully chose this reading as a gift to assist me out of a dark and scary place. She was reading to me out of love and I knew it, but it did not resonate. Religion never really resonated with me.
Once she completed reading the passage aloud, Mom glanced in my direction, expectant. My voice a little low, I dared to turn and say, “I’m feeling a little overwhelmed with all this religious stuff. I feel like I’m going to have to go to counseling over it. The strings you attached to staying with me and helping were that I’d listen to your religious readings. I know they helped you in your time of despair and they mean a lot to you, but I just don’t feel the same way.”
I was waiting for anger, but it was with sadness that my mom replied, “Oh no…that’s not what I meant to do. This is what saved me when I was in a similar space.”
“Yes, I understand that, and I admire that you have so much faith. It’s just different for me. I never liked going to church. The best part of sitting through a sermon was that I got to rest my head on your shoulder. I never paid attention to the words. Working in a Sunday school classroom meant that I got to interact with the kids. Sure, I had to read them Bible stories, but I only did that because it was part of the job. What I really enjoyed was bringing homemade apple bread for them to eat and making chocolate play dough with them.” She nodded, trying to understand.
“I believe in something greater than myself. It’s just different for me.” I glanced over to the two trees I had been staring at while she read the Bible-inspired excerpt to me, “While you read to me I looked at those two trees,” I pointed over to them, “I talk to trees when I want to access the universal spirit. That’s my equivalent to religion or God. I love these winter trees, bare boned, branches exposed like skeletons. It’s my favorite time of year to look at trees.”
“Me too,” Mom agreed.
“They say the roots of trees grow down as deep as the trees grow tall,” I said.
“Yes, I’ve heard that, too,” she replied, “I care more about the roots — the story beneath the surface. People look at the trees and forget about the roots. You can find the religion I’m talking about under the earth where those roots are.”
Kind of understanding Mom’s response, I replied, “The thing about trees is they’re stuck right where they are. They don’t have the option to move. They see all the bad: people could have been hanged on their branches, they may have witnessed sexually assaults or murders. But, they also may have witnessed a family having a picnic underneath them, a wedding, squirrels playing chase, a dog and her owner on a blanket in the sun.”
“I never really thought about it that way, but I see what you’re saying,” she said. “The thing I like to remember about winter trees is that they often have branches growing every which way. It’s not a neat ascension up to the top, and yet, the tree is still complete.”
“Wow, I’d never thought about that before,” I said.
We looked at each other in peace. We were attempting understanding and connection. We were allowing nature to guide us. I thanked my mom for not being angry with me when I shared my authentic self. We seemed to have reached common ground by different means. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I’d finally begun my healing journey by being honest with myself — and others.
Aimée Brown Gramblin is the founder of Age of Empathy. She became a memoirist in her younger years and is writing the stories out now in middle age. A regular contributor to AOE and The Memoirist, Aimée is also a late-blooming pop-culture enthusiast; she’s a contributor to FanFare and The Riff. With a minor in art history, she occasionally publishes art-centric nonfiction.
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